It was easy for Gösta Berling to promise. He was glad to be able to give his wife her liberty. Remorse had made him long for death. The only thing which troubled him was, that he had promised the major’s wife not to die as long as the Broby clergyman’s daughter was a servant at Ekeby. But Sintram said that she could no longer be considered as servant, since she had inherited her father’s fortune. Gösta objected that the Broby clergyman had hidden his treasures so well that no one had been able to find them. Then Sintram laughed and said that they were hidden up among the pigeons’ nests in the church tower. Thereupon he went away. And Gösta went back to the wood again. It seemed best to him to die at the place where the broom-girl had been killed. He had wandered there the whole afternoon. He had seen his wife in the wood; and then he had not had the strength to kill himself. All this he told his wife, while he lay bound on the floor of the cottage. “Oh,” she said sadly, when he had finished, “how familiar it all is! Always ready to thrust your hands into the fire, Gösta, always ready to throw yourself away! How noble such things seemed to me once! How I now value calmness and good sense! What good did you do the dead by such a promise? What did it matter if Sintram had overturned the coffin and torn off the crape? It would have been picked up again; there would have been found new crape, new wreaths. If you had laid your hand on that good man’s coffin, there before Sintram’s eyes, and sworn to live to help those poor people whom he wished to ruin, that I should have commended. If you had thought, when you saw the people in the church: ‘I will help them; I will make use of all my strength to help them,’ and not laid that burden on your weak wife, and on old men with failing strength, I should also have commended that.” Gösta Berling lay silent for a while. “We pensioners are not free men,” he said at last. “We have promised one another to live for pleasure, and only for pleasure. Woe to us all if one breaks his word!” “Woe to you,” said the countess, indignantly, “if you shall be the most cowardly of the pensioners, and slower to improve than any of them. Yesterday afternoon the whole eleven sat in the pensioners’ wing, and they were very sad. You were gone; Captain Lennart was gone. The glory and honor of Ekeby were gone. They left the toddy tray untouched; they would not let me see them. Then the maid, Anna Lisa, who stands here, went up to them. You know she is an energetic little woman who for years has struggled despairingly against neglect and waste. “‘To-day I have again been at home and looked for father’s money,’ she said to the pensioners; ‘but I have not found anything. All the debts are paid, and the drawers and closets are empty.’ “‘We are sorry for you, Anna Lisa,’ said Beerencreutz.